The Intentional Fallacy

22 Pages·1946·1.799 MB·English

by  Beardsley, M. C. and Wimsatt, W. K.

The Intentional Fallacy
Author(s): W. K. Wimsatt Jr. and M. C. Beardsley
Source: The Sewanee Review, Vol. 54, No. 3 (Jul. - Sep., 1946), pp. 468-488
Published by: The Johns Hopkins University Press
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/27537676
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THE INTENTIONAL FALLACY
By W. K. WIMSATT, JR. and M. C. BEARDSLEY
He owns with toil he wrote the following scenes;
But, if they're naught, ne'er spare him for his pains:
Damn him the more; have no commiseration
For dullness on mature deliberation.
William Congreve, Prologue to
The Way of the World
THE claim of the author's "intention" upon the critic's
judgment has been challenged in a number of recent dis
cussions, notably in the debate entitled The Personal
Heresy, between Professors Lewis and Tillyard, and at least im
plicitly in periodical essays like those in the "Symposiums" of
1940 in the Southern and Kenyon Reviews.1 But it seems doubt
ful if this claim and most of its romantic corollaries are as yet
subject to any widespread questioning. The present writers, in
a short article entitled "Intention" for a Dictionary2 of literary
criticism, raised the issue but were unable to pursue its implica
tions at any length. We argued that the design or intention of
the author is neither available nor desirable as a standard for
judging the success of a work of literary art, and it seems to us
that this is a principle which goes deep into some differences in
the history of critical attitudes. It is a principle which accepted
or rejected points to the polar opposites of classical "imitation"
and romantic expression. It entails many specific truths about
inspiration, authenticity, biography, literary history and scholar
ship, and about some trends of contemporary poetry, especially
its allusiveness. There is hardly a problem of literary criticism
in which the critic's approach will not be qualified by his view
of "intention."
"Intention," as we shall use the term, corresponds to what he
intended in a formula which more or less explicitly has had wide
acceptance. "In order to judge the poet's performance, we must
WIMSATT AND BEARDSLEY 469
know what he intended." Intention is design or plan in the au
thor's mind. Intention has obvious affinities for the author's at
titude toward his work, the way he felt, what made him write.
We begin our discussion with a series of propositions sum
marized and abstracted to a degree where they seem to us axio
matic, if not truistic.
1. A poem does not come into existence by accident. The
words of a poem, as Professor Stoll has remarked, come out of
a head, not out of a hat. Yet to insist on the designing intellect
as a cause of a poem is not to grant the design or intention as a
standard.
2. One must ask how a critic expects to get an answer to the
question about intention. How is he to find out what the poet
tried to do? If the poet succeeded in doing it, then the poem itself
shows what he was trying to do. And if the poet did not succeed,
then the poem is not adequate evidence, and the critic must go
outside the poem?for evidence of an intention that did not be
come effective in the poem. "Only one caveat must be borne in
mind," says an eminent intentionalist3 in a moment when his the
ory repudiates itself; "the poet's aim must be judged at the mo
ment of the creative act, that is to say, by the art of the poem
itself."
3. Judging a poem is like judging a pudding or a machine.
One demands that it work. It is only because an artifact works
that we infer the intention of an artificer. "A poem should not
mean but be." A poem can be only through its meaning?since
its medium is words?yet it isy simply is, in the sense that we have
no excuse for inquiring what part is intended or meant.4 Poetry
is a feat of style by which a complex of meaning is handled all
at once. Poetry succeeds because all or most of what is said or
implied is relevant; what is irrelevant has been excluded, like
lumps from pudding and "bugs" from machinery. In this re
spect poetry differs from practical messages, which are success
470 THE INTENTIONAL FALLACY
ful if and only if we correctly infer the intention. They are
more abstract than poetry.
4. The meaning of a poem may certainly be a personal one, in
the sense that a poem expresses a personality or state of soul
rather than, a physical object like an apple. But even a short
lyric poem is dramatic, the response of a speaker (no matter how
abstractly conceived) to a situation (no matter how universal
ized). We ought to impute the thoughts and attitudes of the
poem immediately to the dramatic speaker, and if to the author
at all, only by a biographical act of inference.
5. If there is any sense in which an author, by revision, has
better achieved his original intention, it is only the very abstract,
tautological, sense that he intended to write a better work and
now has done it. (In this sense every author's intention is the
same.) His former specific intention was not his intention.
"He's the man we were in search of, that's true"; says Hardy's
rustic constable, "and yet he's not the man we were in search of.
For the man we were in search of was not the man we wanted."5
"Is not a critic," asks Professor Stoll, "... a judge, who does
not explore his own consciousness, but determines the author's
meaning or intention, as if the poem were a will, a contract, or
the constitution? The poem is not the critic's own."8 He has
diagnosed very accurately two forms of irresponsibility, one which
he prefers. Our view is yet different. The poem is not the
critic's own and not the author's (it is detached from the author
at birth and goes about the world beyond his power to intend
about it or control it). The poem belongs to the public. It is
embodied in language, the peculiar possession of the public, and
it is about the human being, an object of public knowledge. What
is said about the poem is subject to the same scrutiny as any
statement in linguistics or in the general science of psychology
or morals. Mr. Richards has aptly called the poem a class?
"a class of experiences which do not differ in any character more
WIMSATT AND BEARDSLEY 471
than a certain amount . . . from a standard experience." And
he adds, "We may take as this standard experience the relevant
experience of the poet when contemplating the completed com
position." Professor Wellek in a fine essay on the problem has
preferred to call the poem "a system of norms," "extracted from
every individual experience," and he objects to Mr. Richards'
deference to the poet as reader. We side with Professor Wellek
in not wishing to make the poet (outside the poem) an authority.
A critic of our Dictionary article, Mr. Ananda K. Coomara
swamy, has argued7 that there are two kinds of enquiry about a
wrork of art: (1) whether the artist achieved his intentions; (2)
whether the work of art "ought ever to have been undertaken
at all" and so "whether it is worth preserving." Number (2),
Mr. Coomaraswamy maintains, is not "criticism of any work of
art qua work of art," but is rather moral criticism; number (1)
is artistic criticism. But we maintain that (2) need not be moral
criticism: that there is another way of deciding whether works
of art are worth preserving and whether, in a sense, they "ought"
to have been undertaken, and this is the way of objective criticism
of works of art as such, the way which enables us to distinguish
between a skilful murder and a skilful poem. A skilful murder
is an example which Mr. Coomaraswamy uses, and in his system
the difference between the murder and the poem is simply a
"moral" one, not an "artistic" one, since each if carried out ac
cording to plan is "artistically" successful. We maintain that
(2) is an enquiry of more worth than (1), and since (2), and
not (1) is capable of distinguishing poetry from murder, the
name "artistic criticism" is properly given to (2).
II
It is not so much an empirical as an analytic judgment, not a
historical statement, but a definition, to say that the intentional
fallacy is a romantic one. When a rhetorician, presumably of the
first century A.D., writes: "Sublimity is the echo of a great soul,"
472 THE INTENTIONAL FALLACY
or tells us that "Homer enters into the sublime actions of his
heroes" and "shares the full inspiration of the combat," we shall
not be surprised to find this rhetorician considered as a distant
harbinger of romanticism and greeted in the warmest terms by
so romantic a critic as Saintsbury. One may wish to argue whether
Longinus should be called romantic,8 but there can hardly be a
doubt that in one important way he is.
Goethe's three questions for "'constructive criticism" are "What
did the author set out to do? Was his plan reasonable and sensi
ble, and how far did he succeed in carrying it out?" If one leaves
out the middle question, one has in effect the system of Croce?
the culmination and crowning philosophic expression of roman
ticism. The beautiful is the successful and
intuition-expression,
the ugly is the unsuccessful; the intuition or private part of art
it the aesthetic fact, and the medium or public part in not the
subject of aesthetic at all. Yet aesthetic reproduction takes place
only "if all the other conditions remain equal."
Oil-paintings grow dark, frescoes fade, statues lose noses . . .
the text of a poem is corrupted by bad copyists or bad print
ing.
The Madonna of Cimabue is still in the Church of Santa
Maria Novella; but does she speak to the visitor of to-day
as to the Florentines of the thirteenth century?
Historical interpretation labours ... to reintegrate in us the
conditions which have in the course
psychological changed
of history. It . . . enables us to see a work of art (a physical
as its author saw it in the moment of
object) production.9
The first italics are Croce's, the second ours. The upshot of
Croce's system is an ambiguous emphasis on history. With such
passages as a point of departure a critic may write a close analysis
of the meaning or "spirit" of a play of Shakespeare or Corneille
?a process that involves close historical study but remains aes
WIMSATT AND BEARDSLEY 473
thetic criticism?or he may write sociology, biography, or other
kinds of non-aesthetic history. The Crocean system seems to
have given more of a boost to the latter way of writing.
"What has the poet tried to do," asks Spingarn in his 1910
Columbia Lecture from which we have already quoted, "and
how has he fulfilled his intention?" The place to look for "in
superable" ugliness, says Bosanquet, in his third Lecture of 1914,
is the "region of insincere and affected art." The seepage of
the theory into a non-philosophic place may be seen in such a
book as Marguerite Wilkinson's inspirational New Voices, about
the poetry of 1919 to 1931?where symbols "as old as the ages
. . . retain their strength and freshness" through "Realization."
We close this section with two examples from quarters where
one might least expect a taint of the Crocean. Mr. I. A. Richards'
fourfold distinction of meaning into "sense," "feeling," "tone,"
"intention" has been probably the most influential statement of
intentionalism in the past fifteen years, though it contains a hint
of self-repudiation: "This function [intention]," says Mr. Rich
ards, "is not on all fours with the others." In an essay on "Three
Types of Poetry" Mr. Allen T?te writes as follows:
We must understand that the lines
Life like a dome of
many-colored glass
Stains the white radiance of eternity
are not poetry; they express the frustrated will
trying to compete with science. The will asserts
a rhetorical proposition about the whole of life,
but the imagination has not seized upon the mater
ials of the poem and made them into a whole. Shel
ley's simile is imposed upon the material from
above; it does not grow out of the material.
The last sentence contains a promise of objective analysis which
is not fulfilled. The reason why the essay relies so heavily
throughout on the terms "will" and "imagination" is that Mr.
T?te is accusing the romantic poets of a kind of insincerity (ro
474 THE INTENTIONAL FALLACY
manticism in reverse) and at the same time is trying to describe
something mysterious and perhaps indescribable, an "imaginative
whole of life," a "wholeness of vision at a particular moment
of experience," something which "yields us the quality of the
experience." If a poet had a toothache at the moment of con
ceiving a poem, that would be part of the experience, but Mr.
T?te of course does not mean anything like that. He is think
ing about some kind of "whole" which in this essay at least he
does not describe, but which doubtless it is the prime need of
criticism to describe?in terms that may be publicly tested.
Ill
I went to the poets; tragic, dithyrambic, and all sorts. . . .
I took them some of the most elaborate passages in their
own writings, and asked what was the meaning of them. . . .
Will you believe me? . . . there is hardly a person present
who would not have talked better about their poetry than
they did themselves. Then I knew that not by wisdom do
poets write poetry, but by a sort of genius and inspiration.
That reiterated mistrust of the poets which we hear from Socrates
mav have been part of a rigorously ascetic view in which we
hardly wish to participate, yet Plato's Socrates saw a truth about
the mind which the world no sees?
poetic longer commonly
so much criticism, and that the most inspirational and most affec
tionately remembered, has proceeded from the poets themselves.
Certainly the poets have had something to say that the ana
lyst and professor could not say; their message has been more
exciting: that poetry should come as naturally as leaves to a tree,
that poetry is the lava of the imagination, or that it is emotion
recollected in tranquillity. But it is necessary that we realize the
character and authority of such testimony. There is only a fine
shade between those romantic expressions and a kind of earnest
advice that authors often give. Thus Edward Young, Carlyle,
Walter Pater:
WIMSATT AND BEARDSLEY 475
I know two golden rules from ethicsy which are no less
golden in Composition, than in life. 1. Know thyself; 2dly,
Reverence thyself.
This is the grand secret for finding readers and retaining
them: let him who would move and convince others, be first
moved and convinced himself. Horace's rule, Si vis me
is in a wider sense than the literal one. To
flerey applicable
every poet, to every writer, we might say: Be true, if you
would be believed.
Truth! there can be no merit, no craft at all, without that.
And further, all beauty is in the long run only fineness of
truth, or what we call expression, the finer accommodation
of speech to that vision within.
And Housman's little handbook to the mind the
poetic yields
illustration:
following
Having drunk a pint of beer at luncheon?beer is a sedative
to the brain, and my afternoons are the least intellectual
portion of my life?I would go out for a walk of two or
three hours. As I went along, thinking of nothing in par
ticular, only looking at things around me and following the
progress of the seasons, there would flow into my mind,
writh sudden and unaccountable emotion, sometimes a line
or two of verse, sometimes a whole stanza at once. . . .
This is the logical terminus of the series already quoted. Here
is a confession of how poems were written which would do as
a definition of poetry just as well as "emotion recollected in
tranquillity"?and which the young poet might equally well take
to heart as a practical rule. Drink a pint of beer, relax, go
walking, think on nothing in particular, look at things, surrender
yourself to yourself, search for the truth in your own soul, listen
to the sound of your own inside voice, discover and express the
vraie v?rit?.
2
476 THE INTENTIONAL FALLACY
It is probably true that all this is excellent advice for poets.
The young imagination fired by Wordsworth and Carlyle is
probably closer to the verge of producing a poem than the mind
of the student who has been sobered by Aristotle or Richards.
The art of inspiring poets, or at least of inciting something like
poetry in young persons, has probably gone further in our day
than ever before. Books of creative writing such as those issued
from the Lincoln School are interesting evidence of what a child
can do if taught how to manage himself honestly.10 All this,
however, would appear to belong to an art separate from criticism,
or to a discipline which one might call the psychology of com
position, valid and useful, an individual and private culture, yoga,
or system of self-development which the young poet would do
well to notice, but different from the public science of evaluating
poems,
Coleridge and Arnold were better critics than most poets have
been, and if the critical tendency dried up the poetry in Arnold
and perhaps in Coleridge, it is not inconsistent with our argu
ment, which is that judgment of poems is different from the art
of producing them. Coleridge has given us the classic "anodyne"
story, and tells what he can about the genesis of a poem which
he calls a "psychological curiosity," but his definitions of poetry
and of the poetic quality "imagination" are to be found else
where and in quite other terms.
The day may arrive when the psychology of composition is
unified with the science of objective evaluation, but so far they
are separate. It would be convenient if the passwords of the
intentional school, "sincerity," "fidelity," "spontaneity," "au
thenticity," "genuineness," "originality," could be equated with
terms of analysis such as "integrity," "relevance," "unity," "func
tion"; with "maturity," "subtlety," and "adequacy," and other
more precise axiological terms?in short, if "expression" always
meant aesthetic communication. But this is not so.
"Aesthetic" art, says Professor Curt Ducasse, an ingenious